/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16724482]

Thomas Bernhard thread. Rank his oeuvre

Extinction>Gathering Evidence>Woodcutters>Correction>The Lime Works>Old Masters>Wittgenstein's Nephew>Concrete>The Loser>Walking>Gargoyles>Playing Watten>Yes>Goethe Dies>Amras>The Voice Imitator>My Prizes

[Anonymous No.16724487]

>>16724482
Didn't live a tough life.

[Anonymous No.16724501]

>>16724487
Well he was gravely sick for a very long time.

[Anonymous No.16724510]

>>16724487
But his books make my peepee hard

[Anonymous No.16724524]

>>16724482
Give The Voice Imitator another chance. His flash fiction is seriously some of the best I’ve read.

[Anonymous No.16724587]

>>16724487
bukowski poster, please fuck off

[Anonymous No.16724591]

>>16724482
Correction is the only one I have. Can I start there?

[Anonymous No.16724601]

>>16724591
Yes

[Anonymous No.16724622]

>>16724591
>>16724601
Sorry I meant Extinction. I had them mixed up.

[Anonymous No.16724650]

>>16724591
>>16724622
Yeah you can start anywhere

[Anonymous No.16724715]

>>16724482
Okay you fucking shill. I will read his book but if it's another one of oooohhh everything sucks, everybody is dumb while me smart, then i will strangle you in your sleep.

[Anonymous No.16724718]

>>16724591
Yeah I read Extinction last because it’s his last work, but it isn’t really necessary.
Anyone into Bernhard’s plays? The few I’ve read are fucking hilarious.

[Anonymous No.16724765]

>>16724715
you realize that everything the narrator hates he also embodies as well right

[Anonymous No.16724782]

Is Frost good?

[Anonymous No.16724786]

>>16724782
you already bought it, just read it

[Anonymous No.16724801]

>>16724765
I have yet to read it.

[Anonymous No.16724824]

>>16724801
a good example is in woodcutters. the narrator berates a character for complaining about the food for like three quarters of a page. five pages later the narrator berates the food for like three quarters of a page. bernhard's dismissal of heidegger as a backwoodsy kitsch simpleton, more or less a character, is ironic because bernhard himself presented himself in meetings etc. as a backwoods retard and as a character. people think bernhard's critique of heidegger in old masters is a legit critique but it's a joke. heidegger is present on every page of every work bernhard wrote; wittgenstein was his inspiration for character, heidegger for everything else

[Anonymous No.16724838]

>>16724824
he really did hate heidegger tho

[Anonymous No.16724849]

>>16724824
Does one need to read Heidegger and Wittgenstein to get the books?

[Anonymous No.16724850]

>>16724838
i hate that manlet nazi too but his influence can't be ignored. bernhard knew that too

[Anonymous No.16724863]

>>16724849
nah I don't think so, unless you're trying to write a comparative literature paper on him or something.

[Anonymous No.16724865]

>>16724849
You don't. His books are ranting monologues.

[Anonymous No.16724877]

>>16724865
which are philosophically dense

[Anonymous No.16724894]

>>16724877
Not really. His books are accessible and the smaller ones can be read in an evening.
>>16724850
From an interview:
>You sometimes give the impression of biting the hand that feeds, for example when you describe Heidegger as a "weak-minded pre-Alpine thinker" and...

He didn't feed me. Why should he have fed me? But he's an impossible character, he has neither rhythm nor anything else. He lived off a few writers, he cannibalised them, to the last, what would he have been without them?

>I was thinking of the word "Lichtung" (clearing).

That word existed before Heidegger, 300 and 500 years before. He was nothing, a philistine, gross, nothing new. He's a perfect example of someone who unscrupulously eats all the fruit other people have jarred and who gorges himself, thank God, which makes him sick and he bursts. Gets stomach ache.

[Anonymous No.16724904]

>>16724894
>believing anything Bernhard says in interviews

[Anonymous No.16724997]

>>16724622
You got exactly his one novel which I wouldn't really recommend to start with, seeing as it's his last and longest novel.

>>16724877
Not at all. It's kind of a running gag that his narrators always namedrop philosophers (Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Montaigne etc.) but never really engage with their ideas. In Extinction, for instance, Murau says dozens of times that he wants to discuss Schopenhauer, but never actually does so over the course of the book.

[Anonymous No.16725027]

>>16724997
um sweatie just because he doesn't explicitly say "I am now discussing schopenahuer" doesn't mean he isn't engaging with philosophy

[Anonymous No.16725054]

>>16724877
>philosophically dense
Correction has parts that read as if they written by Baudrillard or Nietzsche

>>16724482
of the ones I've read:
Correction>Yes>Concrete>Extinction

[Anonymous No.16725062]

>>16724782
IS FROST GOOD?

[Anonymous No.16725066]

>>16724482
One of the very few authors with a large body of work where I have actually read enough books (everything save for Extinction, Gathering Evidence and most of his plays) to do a meaningful ranking.

Korrektur >>> Watten (very underrated) > Frost > Gehen > Die Billigesser > Holzfällen > Alte Meister > Verstörung > Das Kalkwerk > Der Stimmenimitator > Goethe Schtirbt > Ja > Beton > Der Untergeher > Amras > Ungenach

need to reread Beton and Der Untergeher though, read them before I got used to his style

[Anonymous No.16725090]

>>16725027
He rarely is though, at least not in a way that it would make a difference if you read Wittgenstein etc. beforehand. The only substantive exception I can think of right now are the last ~50 pages of Correction, notably the parts where his usual narrator almost exclusively quotes the manuscripts of his dead friend.

[Anonymous No.16725117]

>>16725090
That’s why I said the guy didn’t have to read Witty or Heidegger

[Anonymous No.16725130]

>>16725117
Fair enough, thought the post I replied to was an objection, and not an addition, to the post above.

[Anonymous No.16725141]

>>16725130
and I thought you were saying the books had no philo content. a simple misunderstanding all around

[Anonymous No.16725372]

>>16724482
Nice ranking. Mine would look about the same. I think you underrate Yes, The Lime Works would be lower for me, and Woodcutters is my personal favorite. I love all of it, though. He's probably my favorite author.

I just wanted to post a PSA in this thread for my Bernhard bros that I scanned and uploaded his out of print (in English, at least) novel The Cheap Eaters to the fiction section of libgen, in case anyone wanted to read that but was having trouble tracking it down.

>>16724765
>>16724824
This guy gets it.

[Anonymous No.16725383]

>>16725372
Insanely based of you to upload The Cheap Eaters. I own a copy (paid like $60 for it), it's not very good but it's Bernhard.

[Anonymous No.16725398]

>>16724482
>being a pessimist while living in Arcadia
he didn't realize how good he had it

[Anonymous No.16725408]

>>16724824
>heidegger is present on every page of every work bernhard wrote
care to further elaborate on that?

[Anonymous No.16725428]

>>16725383
>it's not very good but it's Bernhard
Pretty much. Once I discovered Bernhard I knew I needed to read everything I could get my hands on. Whenever I see him mentioned on /lit/ I get the sense a lot of people who read him are the same way.

[Anonymous No.16725476]

>>16725408
authentic being towards death and the they is the basis for everything

[Anonymous No.16725501]

>>16724591
Fuck no. Correction is the worst place to start.

>>16724622
Start with Extinction instead. His longest but also his best.

[Anonymous No.16725571]

>I thought
>I thought
>I thought
>Hoeller's garret
>Hoeller's garret
>Hoeller's garret
>Fuck Austria
>petit-bourgeois
>tasteless
>*Drops Novalis anthology on you*

[Anonymous No.16725613]

>>16725501
Why

[Anonymous No.16725785]

>>16725571
filtered froggy
>>16725613
I disagree t b h I'd start with a work like Wittgenstein's Nephew

[Anonymous No.16726522]

bump

[Anonymous No.16726830]

Bumping this chad thread

[Anonymous No.16727048]

[Anonymous No.16727056]

>>16727048
One of the best sentences in Gargoyles

[Anonymous No.16727725]

Can I start with The Loser?

[Anonymous No.16727732]

From Old Masters:
This is actually one of the most repulsive characteristics of our age, that it is always claimed that the so-called simple and the so-called oppressed people are good and the others bad, that is one of the most repulsive lies I know.

Imagine me hiking through the countryside with the Irrsigler family, quite possibly the Irrsigler children would even start singing. That I could not stand: the Irrsigler children expecting me to march through the woods of the surroundings of Vienna with them, the Irrsigler woman in front and Irrsigler at the rear and alongside me, holding hands if they had their way, the Irrsigler children. And then the Irrsigler family might possibly expect me to join in their singsong.

People are always very ready to send a person like me to the lunatic asylum, that is to Steinhof, when they learn that a person has been going to the Kunsthistorisches Museum for thirty years in order to sit on the Bordone Room settee every other day. That would be a real gift to the psychiatrists, Reger said.

[Anonymous No.16727735]

>>16727725
Definitely

[Anonymous No.16727747]

>>16727725
yes

[Anonymous No.16728207]

[Anonymous No.16728386]

>>16728207
based and also from Old Masters

[Anonymous No.16728508]

Just read one of his works, the rest are exactly the same. He's got nothing substantial to say, just endless naval gazing.

[Anonymous No.16728794]

>>16728508
I get the first half of the sentence, not the second. The two (very similar) books I read seemed to me to say a lot in a very small space about self-deception.

It's totally legitimate for a writer to repeatedly attempt to perfect the one unique book they're trying to add to the canon.

[Anonymous No.16729211]

bump

[Anonymous No.16730315]

Bump

[Anonymous No.16730420]

>>16728508
outing yourself as a simpleton are you

[Anonymous No.16730441]

Can't take an author seriously whose only press photo is licking an ice cream cone. Like what did he hope to achieve with that photo?

[Anonymous No.16730489]

>>16730441
that's a photo taken by a friend, it just gets posted around here bc its funny

[Anonymous No.16731880]

bump